Soul of the Universe

Have you ever contemplated our smallness in the face of the sheer vastness that is the Universe? Marvelled at the sheer scale and beauty of nebulas that, with a single gulp, engulf entire solar systems? Travelled, in the inner eye of your deepest self, the enveloping sheets of gas and star matter and interstellar fabrics that are the very stuff of the domain of our reality?

The Universe is an uncaring thing. It moves as it wills, and has no qualms about annihilating planetfuls of life, or creating galaxies of them. Life, the simalcrum of self-propagation by conscious chemical and mechanical means, sprouts everywhere, and it is not an accident. Neither is it preordained. When you delve into the deepest reaches of the essence of life it is revealed merely as a string of the most intricately ordered sequences of elements and amino acids - hardly believable that this would lead to a self-arrangement of macromolecular proteins, which become organs and flesh, and finally, mind. Is Mind the sum of a trillion disparate parts, or is it an external construct that comes with the gentle susurration of angelic winds? Is consciousness an element of Mind, or Mind consciousness?

Surely We cannot be mere simulations of will, made as from clay. We are not self-driven puppets, with ourselves both as the marionette and the puppet-master - the strings the trappings of our own incomprehension. The matrimony of Perceived Will and Consciousness endures through the workings of Religon - merely an effort to explain the final nature of the Self and Purpose.

Is the Self, then, the workings of the trillion companionations of neurons? Or is it something more? Is it, rather, a gift of the Universe that powers the engines of reality - which gives breath and life to hitherto men of clay? Is consciousness the breath of life, and life the gift of Will?

Is Self the gift of the Soul of the Universe? And, at the very end, are we, truly, immortal beings? Beings of Mind rather than of matter? Are we the heralds of Purpose - in an ultimately purposeless Universe?

Are we the Soul of the Universe?